Pirate Bay back online as PRQ raid target confirmed

Anonymous kicks at Swedish government sites

The Pirate Bay is back online after nearly two days of downtime, which it blamed on power problems, not the raid against the Swedish hosting company PRQ that was set up by some of its founding members.

The Pirate Bay toldTorrentFreak that the problems were caused by a faulty power distribution unit at its main hosting site. A special part had to be ordered and delivered to its data center before the site could come back online and it preferred to do the work itself, even if it took a while.

Meanwhile police have finished their two-day investigation into the hosting company PRQ, which was set up by two of The Pirate Bay's founders. PRQ doesn’t host The Pirate Bay, but does run a relay for it.

"We are currently working on getting all services up and running after the police have been on a visit," PRQ said in a statement. "Due to their working methods the downtime have been longer that needed (at least 24 hours longer), we are sorry for the trouble it may have caused innocent customers due to their working methods."

The current owner of hosting firm PRQ Mikael Viborg toldNyheter24 that the police had taken three servers that were being used by popular Swedish torrent websites Tankafetast.com and Tankafett.com. They were also looking for the servers hosting Appbucket.net, but found that PRQ had deactivated its hardware in April after the owners stopped paying the bills.

"Between Monday and Wednesday morning the Swedish Police executed a search against an internet company named PeriQ Networks AB (PRQ) in Solna, outside Stockholm, due to the prosecutor's decision," said the Swedish prosecutors office in a statement.

"The reason was ongoing investigations concerning suspected copyright infringements. Several servers were seized at the premises. No one at the internet company is suspected of a crime."

The raid brought a angry response from hackers claiming to be from Anonymous. A video claiming to be from the hacking collective warned the Swedish authorities that an attack on torrent sites was not acceptable and promised swift retaliation.

These dire threats were followed up with a temporary DDoS attack against the Sweden's Courts Administration and a "foul message" was posted on the website of the National Board of Health and Welfare, AP reports. ®